A little more than two years after his infamous “Oscars slap,” Will Smith took his first step toward an attempted comeback this weekend with a surprise appearance at the Coachella music festival.
Smith took the stage during Colombian superstar J Balvin’s Sunday set to perform his 1997 smash, “Men in Black,” from the movie of the same name. And just as his character, Agent J, did in the film, the actor and musician wore a black suit, tie and sunglasses.
Widely-circulated footage of the unexpected duet shows Smith and J Balvin dancing in front of a projected backdrop of alien heads, flanked by a troupe of dancers dressed as agents and green extraterrestrials.
After J Balvin was playfully yanked off stage by dancers, Smith concluded his performance by holding up a “neuralyzer,” a magic tool used by “Men in Black” characters to erase people’s memories.
The starry audience included Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who shared clips of the performance to her Instagram Stories.
“When J Balvin makes an incredible night,” she wrote.
Smith has kept a low public profile after igniting a media firestorm at the 2022 Academy Awards, during which he struck comedian Chris Rock live on stage. That year’s Oscars had been expected to be a career high point for Smith, who won Best Actor shortly after the incident for his performance in the film “King Richard.”
His private life has fallen under intense scrutiny as of late, too, after Pinkett Smith revealed last fall that she and her husband had been separated since 2016 despite maintaining the appearance of a committed couple.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences responded to the slap fallout by banning Smith from attending the Oscars for 10 years. Despite the dent in his public image, Smith will return to the big screen this summer in “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” which also stars Vanessa Hudgens and Martin Lawrence.
Though he didn’t explicitly reference the slap, Smith alluded to the perils of megastardom while appearing at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival in December.
“Fame is a unique monster and I’ve had to be really careful… you can’t get excited when everybody is saying good things about you,” he said, according to Deadline. “The more you take when people are saying good things about you, the more hurt you’re going to be when people are saying bad things about you.”
He went on to note, “What I’ve experienced in my adversities of the last couple of years is that I have to be clear about who I am and what I am attempting to do in the world, and I can’t need others to applaud for me to stay focused on my mission.”
